


instruments of faith.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon What Canon, M/M, supernatural season 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 21:34:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5307659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his dream, Hannah reaches for his hand.  "Angels," she says.  "Angels are dying."</p>
            </blockquote>





	instruments of faith.

**Author's Note:**

> when I think of heaven  
> (deliver me in a black-winged bird)  
> I think of dying

Hannah comes to him in his dreams.  

He is standing on the shoreline of a beach, looking at an ocean with no waves, and Hannah is there at his side, her shoulder brushing up against his.  He already knows she is here for something.  Sometimes he wonders if what they are to each is other has a human equivalent, if she is the younger sister who only calls up her brother when she needs his help.  Or maybe it's the other way around.

"What is it?" he asks.  "What's wrong?"

In his dream, Hannah reaches for his hand.  "Angels," she says.  "Angels are dying."  

"Where are you?" he asks, and Hannah whispers in his ear.

When Castiel sleeps again, he dreams of Dean.  He dreams of Dean, just as he left him, head tucked in the crook of his elbow, hands underneath his pillow.  When he dreams, he dreams he is still there, tucked in beside him.  

\--

Castiel picks her up just outside of Las Vegas.  "There are angels here?" he asks her, and Hannah cracks a smile.  

"Only fallen ones," she says, dryly.  It reminds him of something Dean would say.  

"Where are we going?" Castiel asks.  

"I don't know yet," Hannah says.

Hannah fiddles with the radio.  She turns the radio to static, pure wavelengths of sound, and listens for the Word.  This radio is limited.  The signal is weak.  But Hannah tries it anyway, day after day, and sometimes when Castiel falls asleep at night on another unmade motel bed, she is still turning the dial of their alarm clock-radio, still listening.  He thinks he might have heard a word of Enochian amidst the static, every now and then, but he isn’t sure.  More and more, he thinks, he is losing his ability to hear the Word.  But Hannah is still tuned to the voices of their brothers and sisters.  

He doesn’t get prayers anymore.  Instead he gets voicemails.  His inbox is filled with them, too many.  He doesn’t listen to them, but he can’t seem to delete them, either.  Sometimes he hears his phone vibrate, buried deep inside his duffel bag.  But he never tries to dig through the shirts and jeans and balled up socks in time to answer whoever’s calling.  

He doesn’t have to answer.  He knows it’s Dean.  

He doesn’t know is how Dean has managed to acquire his latest number, since he has been through four burners since he left.  He doesn’t know why Dean would want to call him, since Castiel never answers.  He never plans on answering.  But Dean, whatever else he is, has always been stubborn.  Castiel doesn’t hear his prayers anymore, and sometimes he is utterly thankful for it.  It’s easier to avoid Dean’s anger and building resentment when it arrives in the form of voicemails.  

He isn't sure what direction they are heading towards.  He’s never sure of where he is going.  But he chases down the angels, scattered across state lines and highways and cities; fragile, broken compasses, every one.  

\--

Hannah wants to go inside the service station when they stop for for gas.  He takes his wallet out of his back pocket and rifles through the contents.  He has been using one of Dean’s credit cards, but he thinks his luck is about to run out, so instead he hands Hannah three twenties.  He starts the pump and watches the numbers tick by.  Gas prices are getting outrageous, he is beginning to think.  Dean has been saying that for years.  Now Castiel is finally beginning to believe that it’s true.  He leans against the Continental's trunk and closes his eyes until the pump stops.  

Hannah comes back with a receipt for the gas and a small plastic bag.  “No change?” he asks.  Hannah just looks at him and hands him the bag.  Inside there is a bottle of water and a small bundle of newspapers and magazines.  She is holding something in her hand.  “What’s that?” he asks her, and Hannah holds it up.  

“Chapstick,” she says, with wonder.  “For when your lips get chapped.”  She tears open the packaging and carefully runs the chapstick over her lips.  The air is dry here, but he doesn’t tell her that she doesn’t really need it, that it’s a waste of a dollar ninety-nine.  She takes the bag back from his hand and opens the car door and settles into her seat, then opens a newspaper and starts to read.   

Hannah reads in the passenger seat, her dark head bent over newspapers late at night with just the interior lights on for her to read by.  She circles articles with a red Sharpie.  Later she will spread the newspapers across her motel bed and cut out each one with a pair of scissors she stole from the concierge at a hotel in Indiana.  

Hannah reads the papers for the next fifty-seven miles.  Castiel thinks about rolling down the windows, but Hannah hates it, she doesn’t like the wind in her hair or the way it sends her papers scattering across the floorboards.  

When he glances over at Hannah again, he sees that she is reading a glossy magazine called Starz.  She takes out her Sharpie and circles an article.

“Angels?” Castiel asks.

Hannah makes a noise in the back of her throat.  “Celebrities,” she says with damnation.  She tells him about the articles she’s reading.  Brad Pitt left her, she tells him.  He just left her, and decided to love someone else.  These humans, Hannah says.  I don’t understand.  How can you fall in love with someone, and then just stop?

\--

There is an angel in Gilead, Nebraska, an abandoned church with two by fours nailed over the broken glass in the stained glass windows, next to a cemetery filled with wooden crosses.

Castiel walks past the pews.  His boots crunch on the fragments of colored glass.  Their brother is kneeling on the prayer bench, raising a knife to his vessel's throat.  "Don't do this,"” Castiel tells the angel.  "Please.  This is not the way."

His brother’s despair hangs heavy over him.  “I must,” his brother says.  “I must.  This is the only thing that I can do now."

Hannah crouches down next to their brother.  She holds out her hands.  "Release your vessel," Hannah says.  "You are hurting him."

Their brother tilts his head back, and opens his vessel's throat.  His grace flows into a vial in the vessel's palm.  And the vessel begins to bleed.  Blood is dripping down his brother's neck, staining the collar of his shirt.  Castiel puts his hands against the wound, tries to stop the flow of blood, but Hannah puts her hand on his arm.  

"Let him go," she says quietly.

"Wait,” he says, helpless and angry and filled with despair, “wait, where is he going?”

“Home, Castiel,” Hannah says.  “He wanted to go home.  We all do.”

\--

Hannah stays in the car.  Castiel passes the night with his brother’s body, leaning his back against a pew and stretching his legs out on the rough wood floorboards.  He leaves the body of his brother on the floor between the pews, leaves the vessel going slack and then stiff, leaves the blood drying in dark tacky spots all over the floor.

He falls asleep and dreams of hearing someone call his name, over and over, but when he opens his eyes, sunlight is shining darkly through the cracked and broken stained glass windows, filtering through the wooden slats and staining the walls and floorboards with red and blue and green, and no one is there, no one is calling for him, no one is saying his name.

He buries the vessel in the morning before he leaves.  He stands up and his joints are stiff, his back aches and his legs ache and he thinks for the first time, I am getting old.  He takes a bag and a plastic container out of the back of his truck and pours gasoline and rock salt over the floors and over the vessel, over the blood and the boards.  He soaks the walls and rafters and he sets the body and the church on fire and leaves it burning, smoke rising up in his rearview mirror, leaves it burning behind them as he turns on the road.

\--

The angels will to get home, one way or another.  Hannah picks up a voice just outside Chicago, at Sacred Heart Memorial Hospital.  It's raining.  His boots make slick, wet noises as he walks down the halls.  He follows the signs to the ward, calls the nurse station to have them let him in.  He's family, he tells them.  The nurses look are him strangely.  They let him in anyway. 

He hesitates in the doorway.  There is an angel in a hospital bed, hanging onto a television remote control.  

“Hello, Castiel,” says his sister.  She doesn't really look at him.  She's flipping through channels, slowly.  

“I can’t tell who you are,” he says, feeling apologetic. 

“I know,” his sister says.  “Haddassah.”

“Haddassah,” he says.  He doesn't know what to say.  “Are you all right?”

“No,” she says.  “My vessel is dying.”

“You could heal yourself,” he says.  “You have your grace.”

Haddassah looks at him, finally.  She says flatly, “I don’t want to heal myself."

Castiel closes his eyes, because he knows what she wants to hear.  "You can't let yourself die," he says.  "I don't think it works that way.  I'm sorry."

“Please, Castiel,” she says.  “I want to go home.  Don't you?"

Castiel thinks, If I was a human and she was my sister.  If we were really a family.  I would hold her hand.  I would stay with her.  I would make the funeral arrangements and write an obituary, I would pick out a headstone.  I would order flowers.  But they're not really family.

If his sister was human, he thinks she might be crying.  “You can never go back,” she tells him.  “You already know it.  You will never go home.  Wouldn't you do anything for it?  To go back to heaven?"

"No," he says.  "I don't know if heaven is worth it.  Not to me."  

"It's worth it to me," she says.

"I'm going to try," she says.  "You can have it.  If you need it.  My grace.  I don't mind."

He takes a seat, in the chair next to her bed, and he takes the remote out of her hand.  He says, "Thank you."

He sits with his sister.  When she closes her eyes and opens her mouth and lets her grace spill outside her vessel.  When her heart slows and stops.  When she takes her last breath.  Castiel sits.  He stays until his sister's vessel is cold.  He feels very far away from himself.  He is thinking, if it were me.  If I was dying.  Would there be anyone to do this for me?  If I was dying, would there be anyone to take care of me?  

 --

He speads the map out on the table that night in his motel room.  Haddassah, he writes down over Chicago.  

Castiel thinks about calling Dean.  He almost does.  But he knows exactly what will happen if he calls Dean.  Dean will say, Come back, Cas.  Dean will say, Tell me where you are.  Dean will ask, Why don’t you want me?  Why did you leave?  And Castiel will not be able to give him an answer.

He buries his head in his arms.

When he sleeps, he dreams of angels.  Not the way he remembers his brothers and sisters, but the way humans think of them.  In his dreams, angels wear gowns of gossamer white.  In his dreams, angels sit on the mantles in people's homes and guard their children's sleep.  

\--

He remembers his hours in the wilderness, a new-made man, consumed with thirst, with hunger, with bitterness like wormwood on his tongue.  He has never been so alone, before or since, since the days he had spend on hot dusty buses, walking down hot drought-parched roads, walking through the door of a gas station desperate for water, desperate to stop moving, to stand still.  He thinks about his hands, pale and white under the florescent lights and moving slowly across the register keys at the Gas ‘n Sip.

He knows the secret to action is never stopping to worry, but as he drives along another hundred-mile stretch of interstate he finds his thoughts echoing, an endless pattern of what if? what if?  At one time, he would have believed water and food to be the least of his concerns, should he lose his grace again.  He knows better now.  He keeps the Continental’s trunk stocked, and it makes him feel better.  A security blanket, as much as his coat ever was.  He can feel blood rushing beneath his skin at times; he can feel his bones ache and his mouth dry and his stomach clench when he is tired, and he doesn’t worry, doesn’t think about it at all, he can’t let it go until his work is done.

They stop for lunch at Biggerson’s.  Hannah orders a cheeseburger.  She finds the dessert menu and pulls it out spreading it across the table.  "Castiel, look," she says.  He looks at Hannah.  She is smiling.  Her cheeks are pink with excitement.  She whispers, "Molten lava cake."  Castiel bends his head over the menu and together they study their choices.  He wonders how they must look, two dark heads so close together, hands almost touching. Like brothers and sisters do.    

"What do you want?" Hannah asks.    

"Apple pie," he says.

Two hundred miles later, he stops to fill up the Continental and, on a whim, goes inside the gas station.  He browses through the magazines and newspapers, for Hannah.  He walks slowly through the aisles stocked with beef jerky, mixed nuts, powdered doughnuts, and he buys a bottle of water and a bag of sunflower seeds.  He remembers stocking shelves just like these, filling his hands with cans of Vienna sausages, of tuna, of Spam.  He remembers the dead hour between four and five a.m., of reading every celebrity magazine on the racks and then picking up the newspapers when he had finished them all and read through every headline, looking for anything odd.  Looking for cases.  Looking for angels.  Looking for Dean, even though Dean was always just a phone call away, because sometimes he seemed farther away than that, stranded in the wild.  

Somehow he wanders over to the section of the store selling greeting cards.  There must be cards for every type of event, he supposes, or at least what humans consider the be the most meaningful.  Birthdays are important.  Weddings.  There is a section for sympathy cards.  He supposes if he were to pick a card to acknowledge the current events of his life, this is where he would start.  He pulls out a card with a single flower on the front and the words With deepest sorrow written inside.  He wonders if he shouldn’t write to Dean.  Maybe he’d be able to say something to him if he had a head start.  He searches through the section, but he can’t find anything like he’s looking for.  He thinks the wording is wrong, all wrong.  He doesn’t want With my regrets.  But there are no cards that only say I am sorry.  

He goes to the office supplies section and finds a pad of yellow paper and a pen and he thinks that if he does start a letter, it will be begin with I’m sorry and he will continue with I’m sorry and he will end with I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Dean, I’m sorry sorry sorry.

 

Hannah is waiting for him in line.  She has chosen nail polish in shades of red and pink.  She needs something to do with her hands, she says.  Since you won't let me drive.  Castiel doesn't like the smell of nail polish, but Hannah can't stop moving.  She has a hair elastic that she twists through her fingers for hours while he's driving.  She picks up paranormal romance novels at gas stations and leaves them behind in his motel rooms when they check out.  She runs her fingers through her hair, over and over, until Castiel reaches across the space between them in the front seat, and takes her hand.

"Why are you doing that?" he asks, and Hannah looks at him blankly.  

"I don't know," she says.  Her fingers feel cool and clammy in his hand.  She looks troubled.  "I don't know."

It's just a habit, he tells her.  Just stop.  Try to forget.  

i'll try, she says, but twenty minutes later, she has a strand of hair running through her fingers again.  He doesn't try to stop her again.

\--

 

Hannah picks out the motels.  She likes Comfort Inns.  Castiel asks for two doubles and thinks of Dean, pictures him sprawling on top of one bed, then he thinks of Sam curled tight and tense on the other.  

He walks to the twenty-four hour pharmacy the next block over and buys one tube of toothpaste and two toothbrushes, a comb, shampoo and Old Spice.  He’s thinking of Dean again, of the way he smells after a shower, toweling his hair dry, pulling a clean white shirt over his head.  He thinks of Hannah and adds conditioner, a hair brush, shampoo that smells like lavender.  

He stops on his way back.  He sits on a bench underneath a flickering sign and calls Dean.

"Angels are dying," he says, without preamble.  "Hannah is finding them.  They are taking human vessels and removing their grace.  And they are dying."

Dean is silent on the other end of the line.  "Why?"

"To cross the veil.  To get back to heaven.  I don't know why they would."

"Yes you do,"  Dean says, "You would do it.  You would just go, you'd leave it all behind.  Even me. You'd leave me, and everything we started. Everything we’d talked about.  You wouldn't even look back.  

"It’s not fair," Dean says.  His voice is breaking up through the line.  He thinks Dean might be crying.  He can't be sure.

"Dean," he says.  "Dean, I--"

Dean hangs up.

\--

In their hotel room, he hands Hannah the small plastic shopping bag with the items he purchased for her and she takes out every item and spreads them across her bedspread. “I don’t need a toothbrush,” she says, puzzled.

“Everyone needs a toothbrush,” Castiel says.  “Dean says.”  Dean says lots of things.  Mostly about food.  Castiel feels empty.  If he could explain, he might say that he feels like a dry riverbed, filled with rocks that contain a half-memory of water.  Dean would say he's hungry, probably.  His borrowed grace is wearing thin. So he orders a pizza, with one half Meat Lovers and one half supreme with extra green peppers.  

“I think you’ll like this,” he tells Hannah.

“Is this your favorite?” Hannah asks.  “Is this what keeps you here?  The food?”

“No,” he says.  

"Is it the sex?" Hannah asks.  

"No," Castiel says.  Then amends himself to say, "Not just that."

“Then what is?”  she asks.

He has to think about it.  He chews his slice of supreme, extra green peppers extra slowly, to buy a little time.  “There are so many things,” he says.  He can’t explain, but he wants to.  “They’re all wonderful.”  He is thinking about the look of expectation on Dean’s face when he had bought Castiel a hot dog for the first time and showed him how to load it up with ketchup, mustard, onions, relish.  It had pleased Dean to share that with him.  He feels something like that now, sharing pizza with his sister.  “You’ll have to try it all,” he says. “Then you’ll know, too."

"I saw a heaven like this once," Hannah tells him. 

"With pizza?"

"Yes," Hannah says.  "Not this kind.  Pineapple and ham."

He's thinking of Dean again.  "Next time," he says to Hannah.  "Next time, we'll order that instead."

He holds his phone in his hand while Hannah is in the shower.  He thinks about calling Dean.  Just to say I miss you.  Just to say I'm fine, don't worry.  To say, I dreamed of you last night, alone in our bed.  

“What do you see in him?” Hannah wonders, perching at his elbow the way she has for days, weeks, turning her eyes to follow him as he moves across a room or down a hall.

He struggles to find the words to explain. “He is a good man,” he says. A good man, he thinks, a good man with a tender heart, with warm arms and crinkles that form in the corners of his eyes when he raises his head and smiles that smile that blinds Castiel, in the way the sun turns his vision white and gold and holy; he is wonderful, he is marvelous, this creature of God, reckless and fearful and true, this man who died but is more alive burning with life even in the well of his darkness.

“A good man,” Hannah repeats, like a benediction.  Perhaps it is.  “A good man.”

He lies down on the scratchy bedspread and tries to think of heaven, but instead of the green grass of a park, all he sees is the green of Dean’s jacket, hanging on the back of the bed.   

"Don't worry," Hannah says.  "Your good man will wait for you.  He always will."

\--

Late that night, Hannah will say, so quietly, "What do we do?  Do we let them die?" and he will say, "It don't know if it's our decision to make."

And he will ask in return, "Would you do it?  Would you die to go home?"  and Hannah will stay quiet for a long time.  Then she will say, "Would you?"

"Heaven is not my home," he will say.  

“If heaven is not your home, Castiel,” she'll reply, “then what is?”

Later at night, Hannah will roll over on her bed, rustling the covers quietly in the silence of their motel room. Castiel has been thinking that she has fallen back asleep.  But then she whispers, "Castiel.  I think I know." 

He wonders if Hannah understands what he’s talking about.  What Hannah thinks she knows.  But then he looks across the room, at her dark hair spread out over her pillowcase, and he sees the light from the clock-radio reflected in her eyes, and he thinks that she understands.

\--

She's sitting on the edge of his bed in the morning.  

"I want it," she says.

"You want to die?" he asks.

"No," she says, "I want to live."

\--

“I don’t want to go home,” Hannah says. “I want to stay here.  But not like this.  As myself.  Just me.  I want pineapple and ham pizza and hot showers and ice cream cake."

"I'm going to miss you," Castiel says.  "I was very lonely before you."

“I’m not dying," she says.  Castiel thinks she means for it to sound blunt, matter-of-fact.  But the corner of her mouth is trembling.  So he takes her hand.  

“I don’t want to be alone,” Castiel says.  In this moment, with her hand resting in his, he can say it.  

“You’re not alone,” Hannah says.  “You have me.”

"I never knew I wanted a sister,” he says, and Hannah’s fingers tighten around his.  “Well,” she's saying.  “You’ve got one.  No matter where I go or who I become.  You’ll always have me.”

Castiel closes his eyes and and thinks about red balloons and birthday parties and trips to the beach and sharing bedrooms.  Picking fights.  Everything they might have been, if they had grown up together.  He thinks, I was going to buy you a car.  I was going to teach you how to drive.

"Is it worth it?" he asks.

"I don't know," Hannah replies.  She's smiling.  "I think it might be."

“Sweet dreams,” he tells Hannah.  The way a brother would, to his younger sister.  She blinks in the way that means she doesn’t understand.  But she reaches out and touches his cheek, quick but sure, and repeats the words, almost like she knows what it means.  Almost like she’s been human her whole life.  

“Sweet dreams,” she repeats.  

Castiel holds her hand as she falls.

\--

He calls Dean on his phone in the motel parking lot.

Cas, Cas, Dean is yelling at him over the phone, where are you, where have you been, I haven't heard from you in days, what’s wrong?  

“Hannah,” Castiel says, and Dean goes quiet.  Castiel takes a breath.  Then another. Until he can say, "Hannah is gone.  And I don't know where to go."

He hears Dean sigh into his ear.  He waits for whatever Dean is going to say.  

"You really just don’t get it, do you?  You come to me.  You to come to me when your ass is broke and you need fifty bucks.  You come to me when you’re beat up and bloody.  You come to me when you’re hurt, when you need help.  That’s what it means.  That’s what we are.  I am the person you go to when you need someone.  You come to me.  Me, Cas.  All you have to do is just come to me."

“I can't.  Not yet,” he says.  Caroline Johnson is waiting in the car, waiting to go home.  Just like him.  “There’s something I have to take care of first.”

“You always say that,” Dean says.  “You keep saying that and saying that but you never come back.”

“I know,” Castiel says.”

“Please,” says Dean. “Just once.  Just give up on whatever wild hare you’re chasing this time and come back.  To me.”

The pieces fits itself right in place.

"To you?" he asks, frowning.  Trying it out.

“To me,” Dean says.  Like it's that easy.  Like it's the simplest thing in the world.

 

**Author's Note:**

> night endlessly begins and ends  
> (and ends and begins and ends)  
> after all the dreaming, I come home again


End file.
